Transcription
The superpower you're after, which you actually can acquire through this practice, is to realize that virtually all of your psychological suffering, and actually arguably virtually all of your physical suffering—I mean, or the difference between physical pain and suffering, which, I mean, those two are not quite the same thing—is a matter of being lost in thought. It's a matter of thinking without knowing that you're thinking.
And what mindfulness does, and really any technique of meditation ultimately should do, is teach you to break the spell of being lost in thought and to notice a thought as a thought. I mean, the huge difference is, until you learn how to meditate or do something like meditation, you're just helplessly thinking every moment of your life. You're having a conversation with yourself. You're having content, whether it's imagistic or linguistic, pour forth into consciousness every moment and so incessantly that you don't even notice it. It's just white noise.
And not only does it completely color your experience moment to moment. So, like, if you're having angry thoughts, you're angry. If you're having depressed thoughts, you're depressed. If you're sad, you're sad. So you become your thoughts. But you also feel identified. You feel that you are the thinker of your thoughts. You feel like a self, and it's completely structured by this flow of mentation every moment, and it produces everything you do. It produces all of your intentions and your goals and your actions. And he said this about me, and now I'm going to say this. I mean, so it's like everything coming out of you is born of this same process.
And meditation is a way of recognizing that consciousness, I mean, what you are subjectively, is a prior condition of just be awareness in which everything is showing up: sounds, sensations, and thoughts. And thoughts can become just other objects of consciousness.
And so, I mean, to take even a very basic example of the difference between pain and suffering, you can feel very strong physical pain, unpleasant pain, and just be aware of it. And that sense that it's unbearable is virtually always untrue because you, in that moment, you've already borne it, right? That the feeling that something's unbearable is really the fear of having to experience it in the next moment, in the future, right? Because you're always like, if someone drives a nail into your knee, right? You might think, well, that sounds like it's unbearable. But every moment you're feeling it, you're bearing it, right? It's like what you're thinking about is the last moment and the next moment, and you're thinking about how much, when am I going to get some relief, and what's the cure, and how badly is my knee injured, and you know, it's like you're worried about the future continuously, and you're not noticing the automaticity of thought that is amplifying the negativity of the experience in that moment.
And we all know that you can have super intense sensation which is either pleasant or unpleasant depending on the conceptual frame you've put around it. So, for instance, if you had this massive sense of soreness in your shoulder that you would experience it very differently if it was the result of you deadlifting more than you ever had in your life and you were proud of it. Or if it was cancer and you're waiting for your biopsy results, and you're worried about this is the thing that's going to kill you. Or you're getting a deep tissue massage, and it hurts like hell, but you actually totally understand the source of the pain and you know it's going to be gone the moment the guy pulls his elbow back. Right? So it could be the exact same sensation, each one of those, but the conceptual frame you have around it totally dictates the level of psychological suffering, or it can dictate the total absence of psychological suffering.